“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
My friend Diana’s WhatsApp profile picture is of herself hugging her dog, Zibby.
Every time her name comes up on my phone, there they are. The two of them in a tiny square. I’ve seen that photo so many times I stopped really looking at it.
Until recently.
Zibby wasn’t just a dog. She was part of the whole rhythm of their life, the mornings and the evenings and all the ordinary hours in between that nobody thinks to hold onto until they’re gone.
How Zibby Came to Be
Diana’s husband spent his career in oil and gas. The job took them far, first to China, then to Thailand, the kind of life where you’re always figuring out a new city, a new grocery store, a new normal. They got Zibby while they were in China, though it almost didn’t happen the way it did.
Nicole, their daughter, had her heart set on a golden doodle. She knew exactly what she wanted. And then they went to the shelter, and she saw this little beagle, and that was the end of the golden doodle conversation. It was Zibby. Done.
She was a handful. Sneaky and spoiled and completely uninterested in being told what to do. She got into food she had no business touching. She destroyed toilet paper for sport. She walked into rooms she wasn’t supposed to be in and stared at you like you were the one in the wrong place. Diana corrected her constantly. Zibby ignored her completely, every single time, without any apparent guilt.
I got to know Zibby the way you get to know a neighbor’s dog—in bits and pieces over time. Diana and I live in the same subdivision, and we’d run into each other on walks. There was Zibby, nose down, pulling toward whatever smell had caught her attention, ears flopping, utterly absorbed in her own agenda. She had a way of making you smile without trying.
My daughter and I looked after her a couple of times when Diana and her husband made day trips to a neighboring city to visit Nicole at college. We’d go over, fill her bowl, take her out back, keep her company for a while. A small favor. The kind you don’t think twice about. I didn’t know then how much I’d find myself thinking about those afternoons later.
When Diana’s family moved back to the States for good, Zibby came with them and took to it immediately, like she’d always known this was where they’d end up. She got older. A little slower. Still stubborn as ever. Still finding you when she wanted something, right in the middle of whatever you were doing.
You don’t think you’ll miss the small stuff. The nails on the floor. The way she’d plant herself next to you. The particular chaos of her just being around. And then the house goes quiet and you understand that was the whole thing.
When Loss Piles Up
Diana lost her father about a year before Zibby died.
Two completely different losses. And yet grief doesn’t file things neatly. It just accumulates. One loss sits next to another and suddenly you’re carrying more than you realized, more than you’d ever let on to anyone.
Zibby was the constant through that year. The walks had to happen. The feeding, the vet visits, the daily business of looking after a dog who needed you. That kind of routine is underrated when you’re grieving. It gets you up. It gets you out. It keeps the day from collapsing into itself. And then Zibby was gone, and all of that went with her.
We walked together one morning not long after. Our subdivision was quiet, the air still cool, that particular stillness before everyone else’s day starts. We talked for a while and then we didn’t.
She stopped walking.
Her eyes filled.
“People we love pass away,” she said. “We feel sad. But what can we do? Life goes on. That’s the nature of life.”
She wasn’t brushing it off. She wasn’t pretending to be fine. She said it the way you say something you’ve turned over so many times it’s gone smooth. Like a stone you’ve been carrying long enough that it no longer has any sharp edges.
I didn’t say much. There wasn’t anything to add.
What I Already Knew
I lost my own father a few years ago.
I’m not someone who falls apart visibly or talks about hard things easily. But I think about him every day. Genuinely, every day. Sometimes it’s a memory. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. A lot of times it’s a phrase I hear myself say and then recognize as his, something I absorbed over fifty-something years without realizing it was happening.
That’s the thing about grief that catches you off guard. It doesn’t really end. It just gets quieter. It stops being the only thing in the room and starts being something you carry around in your pocket. You forget it’s there sometimes. And then something small happens, a song, a smell, a dog on a morning walk, and there it is again.
By the time you’re in your fifties you’ve learned that loss doesn’t come once. It accumulates. A parent. A friend. A pet. Some version of your life you didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to. You stop waiting to feel ready because ready doesn’t show up. You just go on, and at some point you notice you’ve been managing it all along without anyone giving you credit for it.
Most people have no idea what the person walking next to them is quietly holding.
The Way Things Come Back
Life settled after Zibby, gradually and without any announcement.
Nicole finished school and came home, found a job nearby. The house that had gone so quiet had people in it again. Diana’s husband had retired. The two of them fell back into the small rhythms of everyday life, cooking, tidying, the unremarkable stuff that turns out to be the substance of things. None of it was about the dog. And somehow it was all connected.
Grief doesn’t go away. What it does is shift. It starts feeling less like an absence and more like a presence. You’re out on your morning walk and someone’s dog comes bounding past and for just a second there’s Zibby, nose going, completely in her own world. It still catches you. But it also means something. Love doesn’t disappear when someone does. It just changes address.
When Diana talks about Zibby now she goes back to all of it, China, Thailand, years of building a life in places far from home, this small beagle at the center of all of it no matter which country they were in. Missing her isn’t proof of something lost. It’s proof of something real. Something that mattered enough to leave a mark.
What I Know Now
If you’re in it right now, grieving a person or an animal or a chapter of your life that closed without warning, here is what I’ve learned by going through it.
Don’t try to get to the other side faster than you can.
Grief doesn’t respond to pressure. It shows up when it wants to, in a photo on your phone, in a habit you didn’t know you’d borrowed, on an ordinary Tuesday with no particular reason. You can’t outrun it. You may as well let it come.
Say the names. Tell the stories.
This isn’t wallowing. It’s just what love does when it doesn’t have anywhere obvious to go anymore. Keeping the stories alive keeps the people alive, at least in the ways that still matter.
Pay attention to the small details, not the headline memories.
The specific ridiculous things. The way Zibby treated rules as purely theoretical. The exact way my father laughed at something he found genuinely funny. Those small details are what make an absence feel inhabited. They remind you it was a real life, not just a loss.
Let routine hold you together.
When you don’t feel like doing anything, the small ordinary things, a walk, a meal, the regular shape of a regular day, will carry you further than you’d expect. Not because they fix anything. Because they keep you functional while you find your footing again.
And trust that life does come back.
Different than it was, yes. But not smaller. There’s room for the grief and room for good things too. That turns out to be true even when it doesn’t feel remotely possible.
What Doesn’t Change
Diana’s WhatsApp photo is still the same.
Every message from her brings Zibby back for a second. Those ears. That face. That absolute refusal to be anything other than exactly herself. I’m glad the photo is still there. Time moves on regardless, but the people and animals we love stick around in the stories we keep telling, in the names we say out loud, in the small things we carry forward in ourselves without realizing it.
Grief begins as an absence. Somewhere along the way it becomes the shape of how you hold on.
We keep going because we do. Because life, as Diana said on that quiet morning in our neighborhood, just goes on. And in carrying everyone we have loved and lost, we become, without noticing, a little more of who we actually are.
What loss are you still carrying that the world moved past too quickly?
**Names have been changed to protect privacy.
About B.R. Shenoy
A writer and blogger on Medium and Substack, B.R. Shenoy explores nature, parenting, travel, and culture, often through her own photography. Married and the mother of two young adults, she weaves personal experience into reflections on family, life, and the world around her.
